ServiceNow, Inc. (NOW) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, good evening, good afternoon wherever you are joining us from today, and welcome to our insightful webinar on reducing field service costs while transforming customer experiences. I'm thrilled to have you here with us today and as we explore the exciting world of field services and the critical role that digital transformation plays in meeting our customers' expectations. I'm Jordan Waechter, and I'm your host for today, and we have exceptional guest speakers joining us from esteemed company WorldVue and also joining us from within ServiceNow focused on industries expertise within product. We could just give a warm welcome to our speakers who are joining us here today. Chad, Chris, thank you so much for being with us. And as we're going to dive into the heart of this discussion, in today's webinar, our guest speaker from WorldVue is going to share their insights and the latest trends and the best practices on customer-centric field service. They're going to discuss with us some of these real-world examples, intangible things that you can do within your organization based on some of their best practices that they've learned along the way. These are going to be practical strategies for using digital tools and data analytics to revolutionize your field service operations. We're also going to hear from an industry's expert on how this is changing within the world of field service management. Joined by a great fireside chat between Chad and Chris, I'm excited to end up welcoming them today. Now in today's fast-paced and ever-evolving business environment, field services have become the backbone of customer satisfaction and retention. So whether you're in manufacturing, whether you're in health care, utilities or any other industry delivering exceptional service at the customer's doorstep is no longer an option. It's pretty much an expectation. However, this journey doesn't come without its challenges. We know that all of these leaders have strategic initiatives in order to reduce their costs, increase things like revenue, ensure customer retention and satisfaction while also providing a great employee experience. This would -- can lead with challenges such as complex scheduling, ensuring that the right technician with the right skills is dispatched to the right location at the time, and that can be a logistical nightmare. We are also dealing with those customer expectations I mentioned. We now expect real-time updates. We want shorter appointment windows, and we want instant issue resolution and higher first-time fix rates. We're also looking into things like asset management with a vast array of equipment and machinery. Effectively minimizing this downtime is a very crucial task. Then there's also the balance of cost control. Operational costs while maintaining that service quality is an ongoing concern for field service providers. So in order to address these challenges and in order to stay competitive, companies in the services industry are increasingly turning to things like digital transformation initiatives. By embracing technology, they are able to streamline their operations, enhance the customer experience and improve their overall efficiency. So I'd like to welcome to the conversation first, Chad Niswonger, who leads field service product for industries here at ServiceNow. Chad, welcome to the conversation. And can you talk to us a little bit about the landscape?

Yes. Thank you very much, Jordan. Thanks for having me here. So before we get started and move into the fireside chat, what we thought was best to do is to really set the stage and provide you with some context about what we're talking about today. And we're going to be focusing our chat on field service management. But before we get to that, I thought I would just describe a few things on what we're seeing in the marketplace and when we work with customers and what we're solving for. So on the left-hand side of the screen here is, let's call it, the left side of the wall, is where most of our customers have a CRM system in place. And they have an engagement layer there. Maybe, hopefully, they're using ServiceNow customer service management. But what ends up happening is that there is a middle office and a back office. And you can see on the right side of the wall, it looks rather messy, right? And this is where we see things start to fall apart. It is where we see, after we've engaged with the customer, we have to get this department involved. We have to send out this e-mail. We have to update this spreadsheet or send this spreadsheet to someone else. There's probably disparate systems. And what you're seeing there is the messy middle. And usually what ends up happening when something needs to get done from a service perspective, when you have a messy middle like this, it can take days or weeks. And that's not good for customer satisfaction. So Jordan -- well, actually, I'll advance this slide. So what we're trying to do with field service management is we're going to unwind that messy middle and provide a seamless end-to-end experience from when you first engage with that customer no matter what channel that is. They call you live. They do it over social. They send you an e-mail. But we want to provide that end-to-end experience with our FSM solution, where we can involve contractors. We can involve the technician and make that seamless if there are suppliers that need to be involved because we need to order parts or we need to -- maybe get some tools involved. But really, at the end of the day, what we're doing here is we're trying to take something that's rather difficult, and instead of it taking weeks or months, we wanted to take hours and days. So that is what we're doing with the FSM solution and what we're going to be talking about with WorldVue here in just a minute. Now if you haven't been exposed to ServiceNow Field Service Management. This slide, I think, at a 10,000-foot level, provides you with a perspective of what the capabilities are in ServiceNow Field Service Management. And we look at them in buckets. So if you look at the half moon there slide, frictionless service, work planning and scheduling, resource management, job execution, and data insights. And then above all of that are the individual capabilities of our solution. And what's rather important here is that it's one architecture, one data model, one platform. And so if you're already using ServiceNow somewhere else in your organization, it should be very familiar. And so what we're going to be chatting with WorldVue about is we're going to be chatting with them about their experience with Field Service Management, all the way from selecting ServiceNow, what they use it for and what problems and things that they were trying to solve that led them to implement ServiceNow Field Service Management. So if you have questions, drop them into Q&A there about functionality. We're more than likely going to be talking about these in further detail when we get to the fireside chat. So with that, Jordan, has a poll for you.

Wonderful. Thank you, Chad, for walking us through that landscape. And something that I just want to add into some of the color, when I think about digital transformation, I view the digital aspects of it as a tool because, really, when we're talking about these transformation initiatives, there's a couple of things that are taking place. And I'm going to go ahead and flash this poll for everyone because I'd love to understand what stage best represents your service transformation initiatives. Where are you at within your current organization? And there's 3 things that I view digital transformation is really about that digital part of it is a tool. It's about the people, the processes and the culture because ultimately, we're doing this. We want our employees, we want our staff, we want our customers to have buy in into these initiatives. We're looking at what are the processes that are broken in these places, how do we address them, what can we do about it, and then ultimately making sure that we're managing that change effectively. So this is a huge part of the digital transformation conversation. I'll give you just another moment here to go ahead and submit that poll response. And as Chad mentioned, throughout the webinar, we encourage you to participate actively. We have a dedicated Q&A session at the end, so please feel free to ask your questions and share your thoughts within the chat because your engagement is highly valuable to us and it's what makes doing what we do so important to us as well. So with that, let's go ahead and see where our audience is at in terms of their digital transformation initiatives. Okay. So we have nobody that has not started. There's about 25% that are in planning and evaluation, 25% in early rollout and about 50% that are well along their journey. So as we're embarking on this conversation to unlock some of these secrets around this customer-centric field service excellence and discovering how we can better transform these field service operations to better meet those expectations and without further ado, I wanted to turn the spotlight on to our guest speaker and welcome in Chris Guthery to the conversation. Chris, how are you doing today?

Good. Thanks for having me. I'm looking forward to this conversation today.

Absolutely. Well, it's really wonderful to have you here with us today. I know that there's been exciting events from the world forums that have been happening with ServiceNow, giving the opportunity to share the story. And when we had first connected, I just remember thinking that WorldVue had such a unique perspective to share because you continue to keep the customers at the center of this conversation. You had joined into the organization with these big bold leadership initiatives that were put into place. So I just wanted to start by level setting the conversation and ask you, tell us a little bit about WorldVue. What does your organization do? And who do you serve?

Yes. For about half a century now, we've been in the business of delivering innovative technology solutions that enhance the guest, the property or the staff experience, primarily hospitality space, right? So as you can see here, we serve over 7,000 properties, 900,000 rooms globally. So whether you either worked at a hotel or stayed a night at a hotel, it's highly likely you've utilized one of our products or services, right? We're a very customer-centric organization with over 127 of our employees being dedicated to customer-facing roles. So we've been around for a long time, which is not common, I think, for people in our space. We're proud of that and really proud of the growth we've achieved and where we're headed.

And so with that being said, what's a little bit about your company's mission? You mentioned you've been in this space for an extremely long time. For our audience, they probably stayed at one of the locations that you guys help to service, which is fantastic, if you want to share any hotel groups or folks that you are able to disclose that information. But within that, tell us a little bit about what's your company's mission. What's your purpose statement for why you've been in these services for so long?

Yes. I mean our mission is to be of service to every guest-centric property in the world. And that's a big statement, right? But we have a deep stack of technology solutions, managed services, in-room entertainment, right, for streaming, casting live TV within a property, guest WiFi property, connectivity, digital signage. If it's a technology solution at a hotel property or guest-centric property needs, we deliver it. And so it's a challenge, right? Sometimes our customer is the guest, and sometimes our customer is the property. And again, you mentioned at the top, right, people want solutions fast and yesterday. And so that's what we're focusing on delivering.

Yes. And that's just fantastic. I can imagine it's such a big purview of everything that you're covering. So within your role, specifically, Chris, what are you responsible for at WorldVue?

Yes. I'm largely responsible for our customer-facing teams post sale, right? So if you think about project management, who has to go and install the products and services that we deliver, our client success team, our help desk, all the tiers of our help desk all the way up through advanced support and our brand operation teams. And so we work with pretty much all of the hotel brands that would come to mind that you can think of.

Well said. Well said. So with that, we know now what WorldVue does. We have a little bit of the pulse check on you, some of your team. I won't steal Chad's thunder because I know he has some great questions coming up for you for the fireside chat. But what I did want to do was flash another poll to our audience to get a little bit of a pulse of what industries you are all joining from here. And what is so unique in this world of services is that not only is it customer centric, but the way that we deliver field services, depending on the industry, can be vastly different. Manufacturing, you might be looking at aftermarket, maybe some of the warranties that are in regards to things; whereas telecommunications, you're providing high fiber optic. So these use cases can be slightly different. And so we're just curious to get a pulse from the audience. What industries are you joining from? And I'll give you just another moment here. Again, that reminder that you can drop questions into the chat throughout the conversation, and we're really looking -- we're all really looking forward to having this conversation with you and seeing what industries you're joining from, so it helps give us some insights of how to best shape the answers and responses to make it most impactful for you today. So with that, okay, we've got health care and other, so that means that there are -- maybe you can also post into the chat as well for us what some of your industries are for the Q&A because given that some of those main ones were buckets. We have others that are joining us today. That would just be fantastic to know who our audience set is. So without further ado, I am going to bring back forward Chad Niswonger to the conversation to also join you, Chris, for a really great engaging fireside chat, where we're going to dive into some of those transformation initiatives, some of the challenges that came into play, maybe partner selection. So Chad, Chris, I'm going to pass it on over to you.

All right. Great. Thanks, Jordan, and thank you, Chris, for doing this fireside chat and this session with us. So I'm going to ask some questions here, and if I see some coming through the Q&A, I'll probably get to those too. But the first thing I think that possibly is on everybody's mind is since when have you been a ServiceNow customer. So how long have you been a ServiceNow customer? And then why was ServiceNow the right solution for your organization?

Yes. So we launched ServiceNow just a little over 90 days ago, right? So I would say we're still in the infancy stages of the platform and leveraging everything that it can do. With our mission to be at service to every guest-centric property in the world, we needed something that could scale with us, right? And ServiceNow offers that scalability, also kind of the built-in process flows that help us align with best practices and future things that we can use that we haven't leveraged yet. Like everybody's talking about generative AI when I was at the World Forum in Dallas about a few weeks ago. That was a hot topic. And I think there are some things that we can leverage there in future releases with ServiceNow. So I think it just helps us be more nimble as we scale.

Okay. Okay. Well, let me ask you this. You also run CSM. Now you have FSM. Is that correct? Both of them?

Right. Yes. We launched both Customer Management and Field Service Management at the same time about 90 days ago.

90 days. Okay. So you're really just taking off the launching pad here with both of -- are they live yet?

Yes, they're both live. So we use CSM as our ticketing system, case management, right, for our help desk or service center. And then we use FSM to manage all of our dispatches and field resources.

Okay. Now so what originally caused you to seek a new technology solution? So before the 90 days, I mean, you had an evaluation process. But was there a trigger that said, hey, we need to get something new?

Well, I mean we're always looking at the customer journey, right? And I mentioned we've been in business for close to half a century, almost 48 years, and have kind of built this foundation with some incredibly intelligent and creative individuals. And so you'll hear people in our organization talk about how we're not a technology company that delivers service. We're actually a service company that happens to deliver technology, right? So partnering with and investing in a platform like ServiceNow, we think it signals not only to our competition but also to our customers that we're committed to our promise -- our customer promise, which is pretty lofty in and of itself, right? We deliver every time no exceptions. That's our customer promise. And so it really aligned with not only where we've been but where we're going as a business.

Okay. All right. So here is a question that, when we do these seminars, we get a lot and what everyone is very interested in is did you use an implementation partner. And I'm assuming that you did. And then if you can talk just a little bit about selecting one?

Yes, absolutely. We did use an implementation partner. So my wife likes to watch HGTV, that Home and Garden Network, right? And so there's the show -- I don't know the name of it. It was on a while back, right, where it was these DIY jobs gone wrong, and they had to call in the experts to come in and fix them, right? And we like to be a measured twice to once type organization. So for us, it was important to work with a partner that had the expertise. And that's really what it's about, is the expertise, right? They understand the ins and outs. They built the platform before for some similarly situated companies. They know how to do the integrations. They guided us through how to best align our current processes with out-of-the-box functionality. I would say, in some instances, they guided us away from some customization that we thought we needed. We're -- honestly, the best practice was to use what's out of the box, right, and ultimately, avoid some of the risks that can come in doing too much customization when you do the upgrades from every 6 months or so, I think, right? So for us, it was about that expertise. I've done some home improvement projects at my own house, and I've hired other people to come do other projects. And you can probably tell the difference if you come to my house on which ones I did.

I think same here. So how hard was it talking you guys out of doing customization? Was it difficult?

It wasn't too difficult, right, because we realized that there were things that we needed to do to mature in our own processes going forward, right? And so there were some long conversations about here's why we do it this way, and we've been doing -- I'm not going to say doing the same things for 48 years, but in a company that's been around for a while, there's definitely some -- just kind of embedded, inherent challenges to change, right? So it wasn't easy, but again, looking at it through the customer lens, I think that's what helped us get everybody on the same page.

Okay. Very good. Yes, I just got to say that, in my past, when I've done implementations, I've always found it very difficult to slow down the customization route and convincing others to stick with the out-of-the-box functionality. That's always -- it's been what has delayed things. I mean because we can customize, but it's really good to hear that you guys were open-minded about that and stayed away from too many customizations. All right. So here's one for you. So just kind of think back before you got into the implementation of this. Can you share with us kind of like what were some of the top challenges that you were up against from a business perspective and kind of what were you trying to solve?

Yes. I mean I think specifically as it relates to field service, Jordan mentioned it at the top, right, which was making sure we're getting the right technician with the right skill set, with the right tools, with the right job, right? But broader than that, everything kind of fell into some buckets of consistency and transparency, right? We wanted our customers to be able to contact us in convenient ways for them. We wanted to provide self-service options where possible. We wanted to make us easier to do business with, right, both internally and externally, with our technicians and our employees. And again, we've been able to leverage a few of the different, I would say, external platforms or internal platforms through ServiceNow, right, like the technician portal, which I think we can talk about a little bit and customer portal, right, for our customers. And so it was really about becoming easier to do business with.

Okay. I see. So here's -- yes, you talked about self-service, which I think is an important thing. So I mean you really want, I believe, and we discussed this, you really want your customers to have an opportunity to fix it yourself without even asking to call you, correct?

Well, there -- ideally, that would be utopia, right? But we know that's not always going to be the case. So some of the self-service we've been able to implement by way of CSM and FSM are the knowledge bases, right? So the customer service experience is different now because if I'm a technician, right, we've leveraged the technician portal, which houses a curated knowledge base specific to technicians that's a little bit more technical. We also have a knowledge base on the internal side for our agents. And then we have a customer service portal, where our customers or properties can go to request new equipment, right, replacement equipment, whether that be set-top boxes, cables, remotes, things like that. They can also look at a specific knowledge base that's curated for them as well. And they can open a case directly with our service desk, right? So we've tried to -- again, kind of going back to making us easier to do business with. Not every property has an engineer or a maintenance staff that wants to go through that process. Sometimes they're just going to call us and we'll make sure they get taken care of. However, a lot of properties do, all of our customers do have more technical folks on staff who are happy to go to a knowledge base, grab an article and go through the troubleshooting steps and fix it without having to reach out to us at all.

Yes. Yes. Is -- so -- but you use contractors and technicians. Who's writing the knowledge base? Who is putting together the knowledge-based articles?

No, it's a good question. So we have a team that kind of manages our knowledge base ITIL process here, right? And so we have the ability to -- through the portal with FSM, we can see the usage of the knowledge-based articles. So we know which articles, the technicians or agents or customers are using, so what's floating to the top. There are also mechanisms by the way people can make recommendations to say, hey, I would love it if you guys could explain this or troubleshoot that in a different way or provide us that information via the knowledge base. Our agents also within the service center, when they get a call, when they solve an issue, maybe it's a new issue, but they've seen it 3 or 4 times and solve it the same way 3 or 4 times, they can promote that workflow as a solution to become a knowledge article. Then, it gets reviewed by a few folks here internally who can make those decisions, write those articles and get those published.

Okay. Okay. So -- all right. Let me just kind of switch gears here just a little bit. Going back to the implementation or even going -- I mean, not just the implementation, I guess, a little bit before the implementation, is there obviously were more than other people involved in just you. And what -- I mean what was it like? What did you have to do to get their buy-in to transition to modernizing this service? Did you have to convince them? Was there hit back or anything like that?

I mean I think when you consider the fact that we've been in business for 48 years, again, I think there's just some inherent embedded challenges to change. But as we always go back to the customer and the customer journey, how do we become more customer centric? What are some things that we can do that we need to do in order to ensure that, as we grow, we're not leaving our customers behind, right? We're actually letting them lead the way and letting us know the types of things that we can do to become a better partner and better provider, right? So once we had kind of gone through that exercise as a team here, I mean, everybody jumped onboard and was kind of fully bought in and making sure we were successful to launch both CSM and FSM.

Both CSM -- okay. Okay. Good. Is -- so there's different roles typically we see when someone implements FSM. You've got dispatchers. You've got technicians. And in your case, which we've discussed, you're using a lot of contractors. So I think all are contractors. So when a customer does reach out to you, there's some dispatching that happens and then, ultimately, the work order and the work order task lands with a contractor. So I mean have you seen a positive transformation with like your dispatchers and your contractors? Are they happy with what's being improved? What -- talk to us a little bit about that.

Yes. And if I'm being honest, I think that was one of the areas I was most concerned about when we launched this, right, because it's one thing to launch a new platform with our service desk, right, who are all here. It's different when we're talking about contractors nationwide. So again, it's still early, 90 days or so into the program. But all the feedback we've received from our technicians has been largely positive, right? They now have a mechanism either on a handheld device or a laptop, right, to access the work orders, to view all of the work notes to understand the work details that need to be completed on the job, the tools that they're going to need to take with them. It gives them the ability without picking up a phone to accept the job, right, to put the notes in what they found, potentially leave a job open because they need to come back the next day to order equipment for the job. Sometimes we get to a job and hey, we found the issue that we need to replace this piece of equipment. I don't have it, right? So they can do all that on the technician portal, and that seamlessly integrates with our -- obviously, on the CSM platform as well, right? So that integrates with the agents that can help them fulfill that request and ultimately, it creates a better technician experience, which leads to a better customer experience.

Okay. Okay. Good. Good. Any -- so we're early on here. But has there been any efficiency gains that you can say we're able to do more work or any kind of efficiencies that you've gained in the first 90 days? And if you could just talk about what you expect a year from now in terms of efficiency.

Yes. I mean I think the ultimate goal is, one, fewer technician visits to sites; and two, ensuring those are as efficient as possible, right, the right technician with the right skills, the right tools, the right job. And so we're in the process of being able to tag all the technicians with their skill set, make sure we can align those with certain geographies and their footprint and ultimately, make sure we are getting the right technician there. I mean we're not perfect. We don't claim to be, but we know that's something that -- where we've been challenged. And this is a key area that we've already seen some improvements. And as we build some of those other pieces out in the FSM platform, we expect to continue to see that, right? We can also measure customer satisfaction, right? So we have the ability to send out a CSAT survey after every single technician visit and get some pretty real-time feedback on the technician, which helps us understand how are we performing, how are they performing, are there certain skill sets that -- maybe we believe that they had, but maybe they don't or maybe they fix something that was beyond the skill set we had in our system, and we can start to update that and make sure our operations as efficient as possible.

Okay. Okay. So let me make sure I got this right. What I'm hearing is you're close to 100% contractors. Correct?

That's right.

So no full-time equivalents, maybe 1 or 2 full-time equivalents that are technicians. But what you've implemented and what you're rolling out here is you have all these contractors. It's all going to contractors. So they actually -- you've got to have a pretty good relationship with the contractors. Can you just talk a little bit about -- I mean, you did touch on it some, but those contractors, like if they don't have the right part or something, they have to use the technician portal. So they have to go into the technician portal, probably say they're done with a job or I need this, I couldn't do it. How -- is that how that's working?

Yes. First of all, I'd say we -- even though we do use contractors, we have a really good relationship with all the contractors that we use. A lot of them have been working with us for 20-plus years or more. And so that has really been a benefit to us as we've transitioned over to some new processes and new tools for them. As it relates to going on site and having to order some equipment, right, one of the pieces of the flow within FSM is being able to close a job incomplete. So they can close the job incomplete, which means they went to the job most likely, discovered they needed to order some more equipment. They can order that equipment, and then they can go back out there and continue that job once the equipment is on site.

Okay. Okay. I see. So those -- the contractors, this -- I mean, it's really about job execution with them because you already have a contract in place with them. You already have predefined rates that you pay them, et cetera. Is that correct?

That's correct.

And so you're also able to capture customer service ratings that are in line with the contractor that went and did it. So with ServiceNow, I think what you're saying is you're going to use us to gauge how well the contractors are doing?

Right. We had a process in place prior to ServiceNow albeit it was a more manual process, right? So now this streamlines that for us. We can ensure that we're asking the same questions every single time. We're getting that feedback directly. And again, that just helps us with the transparency and consistency, right, getting real customer feedback on the technicians, on our field resources and making sure that -- at the end of the day, these guys many times are the face of our organization. So making their jobs easier by giving them real feedback and also making operation run more smoothly by utilizing that feedback to make us better.

Okay. Okay. So let me ask you this question. Real interested in hearing what you have to say here. So we know that one of the keys to successfully delivering service, you want to have right technician, who's got the equipment, who's got the tools and they can complete the job and under the standard duration. So first to do our job, you'd like them to get it done in 90 minutes. Just help us understand, anyone who's listening and -- on here, what -- do you -- how do you see artificial intelligence, AI? Do you see -- do you think it could help you? And then in what ways should we apply AI in the service experience so that you get something out of it? So is it kind of an AI question. Really, how do you see it? How would you want us to help you? Where could we -- yes, go ahead.

I was going to say, I think we're in the infancy stages of evaluating that right now. It is some of the things that we've seen in terms of utilizing AI to create auto summaries of cases, right? So we use cases in CSM that can outline a customer interaction from beginning to end. And so we know that some of the AI capabilities within ServiceNow can create that case summary that says here's a paragraph on what happened, right? And then we can then relay those either internally, right, or we can even relay those to a customer, summarize those for some of our larger clients, right? So I think there are some things within the tool that we'll be able to utilize to make us -- or help us look at the business in a different way and bucketize certain issues and certain solutions in terms of what was done to resolve them.

Okay. And do you think that -- so summarization, so cases, work order summarization. And what we've released on the FSM side is work closure notes, and we're going to be releasing a lot more in the FSM space. But like when someone's done with a job, what we're doing is we're creating the closure notes for them. This is what we did. I did this, et cetera, which we just released. Do you think that contractors would use AI functions?

Yes, absolutely. Absolutely will. I mean contractors are the ones who are most in tune with our -- or very in tune, I should say, with our technology, right? And so I think if we can demonstrate the value, right -- it's all about value. If I can demonstrate how it's going to make their life easier, I can demonstrate how it's going to make their interaction with the customer easier or if I can demonstrate how that's going to enhance their experience because they know the history of what happened at that property over the last 6 months and makes it -- push that at their fingertips, I think we'll absolutely be able to get them to use that.

Okay. Okay. So let's -- I think we've got about another 5 minutes left on some -- me and you doing questions. So I'm going to move into the -- I guess, I would put this topic as impact and vision. So with ServiceNow solutions, have you seen improved communication and collaboration amongst your teams?

Yes, absolutely. Again, we launched CSM and FSM at the same time, right? And so now everything that's done within a particular case, right, is visible by our agent. It's visible by our dispatcher, and it's visible to the technician. Also, external notes are visible to the property. So in terms of overall transparency, that's been a huge gain for us. Also, because of that, we can begin to see -- we talked about knowledge articles earlier, right? We can begin to see where there are gaps in our knowledge base, things that become repetitive and we think, you know what, we could probably put a self-help article out there for either a technician or even to a property that would eliminate them needing to call us or us potentially needing to go out to a site. So those are some of the gains I think we've seen over time.

Okay. Good. Good. Is -- so this is a question I'm going to ask is -- I mean, it's related to mission. It's kind of high level. But every company has a mission. We know that. And they vary company to company to company. But the question is how does ServiceNow help you deliver on your company's mission?

Yes. Yes. I think not only our mission but our customer promise, right, which I think I mentioned at the top, which is we deliver every time, no exceptions. And so I think there are 2 things that we're really looking for. One is transparency, both internally and externally; and the other is consistency, right? So our agents having the ability to access everything within a case, the history, what had happened, technicians being able to communicate in real time with our dispatch team and our technical teams, and the customers having -- through the customer portal, right, real-time visibility to updates on their case, things that have changed. So if we make a change, if we make an update customer gets an alert, an e-mail that lets them know, hey, an update has been made to your case. They can go into our customer portal and see what their progress is. And so I think it's really about transparency and consistency, which help us deliver on that promise.

Okay. Okay. Yes. So then your legacy systems are the systems that you were using before this, you had some bottlenecks in there that didn't provide transparency, right?

Well, we had a lot of communication that was done outside of the system, right? It might have been e-mails. It might have been phone calls that weren't tracked, right? And so now having the ability to send those types of messages directly from CSM, right, all of that information, all the communication back and forth stays within the case.

Within the case. Okay. So then ultimately, those contractors out there, when they get to work, they have pretty much all the information they need at their fingertips?

Yes. And if they don't, they can communicate with us through the portal to ask those questions, and we can get back to them and make sure they have [indiscernible].

Okay. So last question under the impact and vision topic. How has ServiceNow helped you reimagine how you have served your own customers?

Now I think it comes back to the customer-centric philosophy, right? How can we be easy to do business with? I mean Amazon is wildly successful for a number of reasons, but I would say arguably #1 is because you can -- with one click or in a lot of our cases, one swipe, you can have something delivered to your doorstep in hours, certainly within a day or 2, right? And so I think we see that we now have a platform that as we think through this customer-centric philosophy and customer journey, we think we can make some of those frictionless experiences a reality, right? And we're in the hospitality business, right, for the most part, and that means that our customers are -- they are either a guest trying to have a fantastic vacation or they're a property trying to deliver an impeccable guest experience, right? And we want them to be able to focus on that rather than focusing on an issue they have with some of the technology potentially that we provide. So we will be easy to reach, easy to deal with, and we will be able to resolve their issues, again, to make sure that they can focus on what their job is. Their job is to deal with us, right? That's our job, to fix things.

Yes. Nice. Well, thank you very much, Chris. Jordan, is there any questions in the Q&A that we could pull out now and try to answer?

Absolutely, yes. And I just wanted to thank you both for the engaging conversation. And Chris, you're just sharing internally, the challenges that have happened at WorldVue everything from looking at technology providers to implementation partners, what did customizations look like or not look like, and even into your field operations and working with contractors. I mentioned that earlier, depending on what industry we're coming from, the way that we manage field service or whether you're joining this conversation and you oversee this kind of organization and you're looking into customer operations and excellence or maybe your field service delivery manager or you're on the dispatch team, we each play a really crucial role into that larger transformation initiative. That's why I said what I mentioned earlier, was that digital transformation, the digital part is just a tool. It's really about the people, the processes and the culture. So Chris, I wanted to circle back to your service transformation initiatives just quickly to give you the opportunity to discuss at that high level the few things you mentioned. There was case management. But just kind of closing that loop on some of what WorldVue has implemented that was a part of your goal of really having this stay both customer centric, but really, it sounds like there's a strong care and investment into these employee and contractor relationships as well, making that be accessible and seamless service of the experience from all sides. So Chris, could you just give us a little bit of the high-level recap of this? And then I'd love to know a couple of your takeaways for the audience, and then we'll poke through a few of those questions that have come in.

Yes. I mean I think we know that creating a good employee experience leads to a good customer experience, so providing the most convenient and integrated tools possible to our -- whether it's our service center, our help desk or our technicians will make their lives easier. And by doing so, they're able to deliver a better customer experience along the way, right, so again, with the customer portal, being able to reach out to us in multiple different ways for many different things rather than having every time you pick up the phone or send us an e-mail. We talked through the different knowledge bases that are available to 3 different audiences and the ability to make changes to those, to see what's being used and to update those as needed. Another thing I don't think I mentioned but on this slide, which is the ability for our technicians, when they're in the field and they're having an issue, they can take a picture and upload that directly into the case. So our team back here at our service center can take a look, maybe evaluate what they're seeing and then they can kind of work in tandem, right, so to make sure they get the right solution. So some of these things are -- they seem simple, but having a system that integrates all that really does make for a better employee, technician and ultimately, customer experience.

No, it's so spot on. And I see the way that, as an example, adding that picture, you're communicating back with your team. So if you are having any kind of a tech that's on site, I like personally -- we use the word field service technicians. And I've been living in this world, listening to podcasts, other thought leaders, and there's a few in the space that have even transitioned to not calling them field service technicians, just calling them service technicians because the truth of the past few years is that somebody may be -- they might be coming from on-site at an office or they might be remote. And it's everything into -- from when that truck roll starts, right, from the time that tech goes, gets into their vehicle, wanting to make sure that they have all the proper equipment. They're getting their on-site. They need to locate this asset, let alone if it was a linear asset where it was within that journey and the ability to speak bidirectionally to the team that's supporting them. And I view that as so much of the power of these digital tools that exist and the larger themes that come into place. So within that, I just want to know for our audience, if you kind of had a 1 to 2, 3 takeaway for them, some closing thoughts, what would you want to leave with them today from this conversation, Chris?

Yes. I mean I think we are growing not only in our geography, right, over time, but we're also expanding our product stack and that's going to stretch us, right? And so we're kind of depending on FSM with ServiceNow to be that platform that can help grow with us. And again, we're early on. There are a lot of things we're not doing. In fact, I was just talking with Chad before we went live about -- he's located here close by. He's going to come by, I think, next week and just spend some time with our team, right, to see exactly how we've implemented FSM and maybe some things we could do differently though. So a lot of it is kind of building this foundation. I think secondly, we talked a little bit about reducing [ ROEs ] you can deal with. And that is not just for our customer, but it's also for our employees and our technicians. So how do we continue to reduce that friction for all of the invested parties along the way? And lastly, I've mentioned our promise, right? We deliver every time no exceptions. I mean that is a steep promise, but that's what we strive for. And it's something we continually look to things like technology to help solve for us. And I think some of the things that are coming that Chad mentioned, like some of the AI, generative AI, case submission -- tech case submission, things like that, those are small things we can do that kind of lead us down the path to larger things in the future to help us deliver on that promise.

Absolutely. Spot on. Agreed within that. So with that, I'm going to move into the Q&A. We just have a couple of moments that are left here. Chad and Chris, I want to thank you so kindly for sharing your resources, your expertise, your kindness just for being with us here today. The biggest thing I've seen being in the service space is that we all want to learn from one another. We all are looking at solving similar challenges in unique ways, and the best way to do that is to crowd source and learn from other people's journeys. So one of the questions that we have in the chat from [ Chan ] is how did you approach the cultural and organizational changes that often come with digital transformation. And were there any strategies that you employ to help ensure this employee buy-in or adoption of the new technologies?

If you go to slide -- I think it's Slide 12. I want -- there's something I could point out there. So if you look at the bottom right of that triangle, that's our values, right? Our logo, [ Xespiro ], our values still chirp, right? That's coachable, humble, intelligent, responsible and persistent. And so making sure we're hiring people that are coachable, I think, is a huge piece because that helps us understand that, as things change, they can adapt, right? And so I think a lot of it is making sure that we have the right people on the right seats on the right bus. That's really helped us ensure that we're aligning internally.

No, that makes sense. Makes sense. [Operator Instructions] Although we are running short on time today, we will be sure to get back to you in those responses should we not have the chance to answer them today. So a reminder that, that is there for you. I think we have time for one more question before we get into our closing thoughts. And this one is from Tom and it says customer centricity is a vital aspect of our field service operations. How has the digital transformation enhanced your ability to provide that more personalized and customer-focused service experience?

Yes, that's a great question. The ability for our field technicians, our agents and our dispatchers to have the entire history of what's happened on an account, that ensures that when somebody calls us and they've had 3 issues in the last day and they've all been the same and it's still not resolved, which got forbid, that's the case, but we have the information there to make sure that we're not starting from scratch every time we start with the customer. We've got enough history there to pick up the conversation and have a meaningful discussion with them. And the last thing I would mention, we talked a little bit about CSAT scores. We not only have the CSAT scores available for our technicians, we also have that for our agents as well. So when cases are closed, right, we're able to send a CSAT notification or survey, I should say, out to that customer, and we can get direct feedback on the agent specific to that case and again, use that for coaching to create that better experience.

Pretty amazing that, that's on both sides for both the agent experience and the customer experience because that goes down to kind of those 4 main points, right? We're trying to increase revenue. We want to reduce our operational costs, but we also care about our customer experience, the same as our employee experience. That employee could look like our tech, our dispatchers, even folks like yourself. So I just wanted to thank you so much for being here again with us today, sharing your knowledge, sharing your expertise, Chad, leading us through an engaging conversation. Thank you so much to our speakers for this conversation today.

Yes. Thank you, Chris.

Thank you.

So with that, just a few housekeeping items. Be sure to sign up and join us for knowledge in our digital experience if you are not able to join us live. It's going to be really fantastic to be able to see some of the sessions that happen from this year. And coming up soon as we look into 2024, cannot believe that we're already in November at the close of this year. We will be live with Knowledge in Las Vegas as well. Be sure to look up local, regional events that are happening in each of your cities. Join with other user groups and be sure to be active inside of those conversations that take place. And don't forget that if you want to rewatch this webinar or share with others or look at anything else that's within our webinar and inventory, you are welcome to go and view all of these on-demand here with ServiceNow. So we wish you all a really fantastic day, evening, wherever you're joining us from, and thank you so much for your time today.